Writing Taiwanese

Written Taiwanese provides the first comprehensive account of the different ways in which Taiwanese (i.e., the Southern Min language of Taiwan) has been represented in written sources. The scope of the study ranges from early popular writings in closely related dialects to present-day forms of written Taiwanese. The study treats written Taiwanese both as a linguistic and as a socio-political phenomenon. The linguistic description focuses on the interrelation between written units and Taiwanese speech and covers various linguistic subfields, such as Taiwanese lexicography, phonology, and morphosyntax. The socio-political analysis explores the historical backgrounds which have led to different conventions in writing Taiwanese.

A number of Taiwanese scholars gate-kept, filtered, selected, and strategized to transfer Luce Irigaray’s, Hélène Cixous’s, and Julia Kristeva’s French feminist theories into their own national context by exerting their cross-lingual and cross-cultural academic power in the 1990s. They also reshaped, localized, acculturated, marketed, and Taiwanized these French feminist theories, which was essential for Taiwanese academia. According to French feminist literary theories, écriture féminine (“feminine writing”) refers to women’s own written self-expression used to escape from the patriarchal language system. Beginning with a description of the acculturation of French feminist literary theories, this book highlights how women’s own spoken voices or autobiographical written expressions appear in Taiwanese cinematic works when the camera is compared to the cinematic pen. It analytically digest the écriture féminine of parler-femme in the Taiwanese films The Butcher’s Wife, Taste of Life, Sex Appeal, and Ghosted.

Few people beyond the shores of Taiwan are aware that it is home to a population of indigenous peoples who for more than fifteen thousand years have lived on the island. Over the years, through the Chinese imperial period, the Japanese occupation, and for most of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan were marginalized and deprived of rights. However, with the lifting of martial law in 1987, new government policies regarding ethnic groups, and growing interest in Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, indigenous writing began to blossom. With its intense and lyrical explorations of a fading culture, indigenous writing has become an important topic of discussion in Taiwanese literary circles. This collection of indigenous literature is the first such anthology in English. In selecting the stories, essays, and poems for the anthology, the editors provide a representative sampling from each of Taiwan's nine indigenous tribes. The writers explore such themes as the decline of traditional ways of life in Taiwan's aboriginal communities, residual belief in ancestral spirits, assimilation into a society dominated by Han Chinese, and the psychological and economic encroachment of the outside world. Their writings offer previously unheard perspectives on the plight of aboriginal cultures and the experiences of Taiwanese minorities. John Balcom has included an introduction to provide the reader with background information on Taiwan's indigenous peoples. The introduction addresses the origins of Taiwan's Austronesian peoples and general information on their culture, languages, and history. A discussion of the growth and development of indigenous literature, its sociolinguistic and cultural significance, and the difficulties faced by such writers is also included.

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future. As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world. Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

This collection is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwanese literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present.

Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: an Ecocritical Study of Indigeneities and Environment is the first full length single-authored study of Native American writer Linda Hogan and the first book to address Hogan’s poetry and prose primarily from ecocritical perspectives (inclusive of ecofeminism, environmental justice, postcolonial ecocriticism, and animal studies). It also is unique for the reason that it is a comparative study of the work of Hogan and writings by Taiwanese environmental writers, scholars, and activists. Chapter One, which serves as the introduction to the book, written by and from the perspective of an indigene, begins by giving readers a glimpse into the kind of world in the east in which the author came of age. It then relates this world to the western worlds that Hogan writes about in her poetry and prose. Chapter Two focuses on Hogan’s most recently published novel, People of the Whale (2008), and on the arguments that the novel makes about the environmentally unsustainable acts of corporate globalization that involve the trade in endangered animal species. Huang relates those arguments to the oil industry in Taiwan and to the extirpation of cetacean species in the waters of Taiwan by this industry. Chapter Three is an analysis of the novel Mean Spirit (1990). Huang reads this novel mostly through the lens of environmental justice arguments. Chapter Four addresses the novel Solar Storms (1995) from the perspective of ecofeminist theory and in the context of the issue of the escalation of mega-dams in East Asia. Chapter Five analyses the novel Power from animal studies perspectives. Chapter Six is a comparative studies reading of poems by several prominent Chinese, Taiwanese, and Aboriginal poets—Taiwanese poet Ka-hsiang Liu, Paiwan poet Mona Neng, Atayal poet Walis Nokan, and Chinese-Taiwanese poet Guangzhong Yu—and Hogan’s latest collection of poetry, entitled Dark. Sweet: New & Selected Poems (2014). In his reading of this work, Huang relies on a definition of “ecopoetry” in Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s recently published The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013). He also brings together the main theoretical ecocritical terms that he discusses in the previous chapters.

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of 'Taiwan Studies', and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future. As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world. Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.